Burnsville Takes Budget Shortfalls out of the Hides of Kids

Yesterday's Minneapolis Tribune carries an Editorial challenging the Burnsville school district for considering a plan to reduce its $140 million dollar budget by about $5 million by reducing the number of school days of instruction.  Here's how the plan apparently would work.   There would be no school every other Monday, cutting the number of school days significantly.   So far, this is a variant of the proposal adopted by a number of rural school districts facing financial crisis, in which they cut back to a four day school week, and add compensating time to the remaining four school days each week.   Burnsville would skip only every other Monday, reducing the number of days when families would have to find day care for younger children, and figure out how to manage their older, hopefully more responsible, children.

The district would then increase the amount of time for each remaining school day by 35 minutes.   Assuming that all of these additional minutes result in additional instructional time, the added 35 minutes would compensate for most of the lost days, but not all of them.   If my arithmetic is correct, adding 35 Minutes to 9 days every two weeks results in 315 minutes gained, but losing a Monday every two weeks, results in a loss of 480 minutes every two weeks, assuming an 8 hour school day.   Now the net loss in instructional time can't be calculated without knowing how much of the day is spent in actual instruction.   But the potential for this swap in schedule is that there would be a net loss of  160 minutes, plus or minus, every two weeks.   Again, if my arithmetic is correct, the added time, compensated for by the lost days, results in a net reduction of about 5 traditional school days.  If anybody finds a problem with my arithmetic here, let me know.

What does the District get in return?   The District has a number of  Mondays now available to conduct professional staff development, without hiring substitutes.  The cost of hiring substitutes is shifted on to the parents, to some extent, who must now pay for day care, or take some time off from work to stay home with their kids.   The district would save about $800,000.  The plan represents a continuing pattern in Minnesota public education, in which school districts cover their increased payroll costs on the backs of children.   I'm not criticizing Burnsville, really.   They are doing what most everyone else is doing across the country.  

What is the cause of Burnsville's fiscal crisis?   That depends upon your point of view.  Between the 2005-2006 school year and the 2010-2011 school year, the average teacher salary in Burnsville has risen from about $52,000 to about $60,000, exclusive of benefit costs.  That's an increase of about 13 percent, or about 2 and one half percent per year.  (Individual teachers pay increases are going up more or less than that amount, because average teacher pay costs represent a netting of salary increases, offset by the impact of replacement of retiring teachers by teachers coming at starting steps and lanes.)   The Minnesota funding formula rose about 11 percent during that time period, but some of that increase would have been offset by significant special education losses inflicted by state policy.  So the effective net increase in Burnsville's funding is less than 11 percent.  The District is increasing educator's compensation at a rate faster than state revenues, and as long as it does that,  it must find creative ways to make up the difference.

Now some of you are going to chime in and use this as an excuse to attack teachers, administrators and their unions.   If the unions didn't demand pay increases greater than available funding, you will say, then Burnsville wouldn't be looking at these cuts.   And some of you are going to chime in and say that's wrong, that the State's fiscal problems shouldn't be solved "on the backs of educators."    And others are going to argue that school boards are at fault, because they should just hold the line somehow.   But in my view, the underlying cause of  our dysfunctional school finance system is a complete abdication of responsibility for creating a system that works by the legislator and the Governor of the State of Minnesota.  Democrats and Republicans have conspired to create this dysfunctional system, which annually provides funding less than the increase in labor and other costs.  

The Democrats steadfastly protect the absolute right of labor to push up labor costs faster than school districts can afford.   They have cleverly shifted the blame for this upon school boards and republicans, but the system that has been created at the state level, and that is where the responsibility lies.   The Republicans steadfastly insist that taxpayers be held largely protected from this problem, and assure that any excess costs are not covered by revenues, but rather come out of the hide of children and parents.   The two together have created a system which is so broken that the participants don't even remember what it might be like to participate in a stable properly functioning education finance system.  

In my recent posts on a constitutional school finance system, I've argued that the legislature and governor have an obligation to correlate the cost of the current system of public education to reality, and to provide adequate funding to keep it afloat.   My argument isn't that teachers should be paid more, and it isn't that they are paid too much.   My argument is that it is high time that the legislators and the governor take responsibility for figuring out what educators should be paid, taking responsibility for that decision, and implementing it in a way that doesn't pay for it out of the hides of children.   If the state wants to legislate based on the idea that teachers don't deserve more, then it needs to implement a system that makes it possible to stop providing unaffordable increases.   If the state wants to legislate based on the idea that teachers do deserve more, then it is high time,  really, that the state takes responsibility for that position, and ponies up the money to pay the necessary increases.

In the meantime, if we keep up with the current approach....pay increases on the backs of kids and parents...this Burnsville gimmick is just going to be the first in a long series of destructive, wrong-headed, irresponsible tricks that taken together represent the destruction of our system of public education in Minnesota.

Links
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part I
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part II
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part III
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part IV
Summary of Decision Network for Excellence
Washington Supreme Court Blog 
JvonKorff on Education, The Rose Decision 
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part I
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part II
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part III
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part IV

Correlating the cost of education: fund the child.

This is the sixth in a series of posts on concepts suggested by the recent Washington Supreme Court decision,  McCleary v. State, enforcing the State's constitutional requirement to assure appropriate funding for public education.  You can jump to prior posts in the series using links below.  McCleary v. State deals with a number of important issues in education finance jurisprudence. One of  McCleary v State's important holdings is that that the funding formula in Washington is unconstitutional, in part, because the funding formula did "not correlate to the real cost of amply providing students with the constitutionally required education." As a result, McCleary explains, the State has consistently failed to provide adequate funding for the program of basic education.

In yesterday's post, I suggested that one way that the Minnesota judiciary could apply the McCleary correlation doctrine is to require that the Governor submit a budget to the legislature that covers the true cost of a state required education.   I suggested, as well, that the legislature should be required to follow a process in response that is based on a genuine attempt to determine the cost of the education that the legislature requires.   How would a Court determine, under this approach, that the legislature and governor had done their job appropriately.

The vein I'm trying to mine here, is whether there is a principled approach to judicial review that maintains respect for the democratic functions of the executive and legislature.   Is there a way in which the Court can force the governor and legislature to meet their constitutional responsibilities, without taking over the entire governance process.   This is an important issue, and its solution requires some careful thought.   It is obvious, I think, that the Governor and Legislature are violating their constitutional responsibilities.  The real question is whether we can find a remedy that is properly respectful of the respective role of the three branches of government.  

 I assert that one test that could be applied, is whether the Governor and legislature engaged in an a genuine costing out process that meets certain minimum standards of validity.  One test of validity, surely, would be that the Governor and legislature adopt a costing approach that recognizes that some students cost more to educate to proficiency than others.   To be valid, I assert, the costing out approach would have to make a genuine attempt to measure those cost difference. 

This concept, that some children cost substantially more than others to educate to a high level, is supported by the highly respected conservative think-tank Thomas Fordham Institute, In its 2006 Report, Fund the Child, the Institute argues: "Although we may wish that achieving this [proficiency] goal were easy for every student, numerous studies have shown that some students require more resources than others:

• Some start behind because their lives prior to school did not provide them with the same educational opportunities as other children.
• Some home circumstances present problems related to health, nutrition, parental support, and other conditions, all of which materially impact children’s performances.
• Some have disabilities that lead them to require additional education services and attention.
• Some are from homes where English is not the primary language.
• Some are recent immigrants who had little formal education in their home countries"

As parents, we know that some of our children seem to thrive at school effortlessly, and some require tremendous extra assistance at school and at home. We put "Pat the Bunny" in front of one of our children, and almost as if by magic, it seems, they are reading at an early grade. But a second child, raised in the same home, by the same parents, with the very same level of dedication to learning, doesn't catch on until years later than the other. One child needs almost no encouragement from the teacher, the other desperately needs it. As parents, we don't say, "all of my children are equal, so I'm not going to give any more help to one of my children than the other." In fact, we know that when we love our children equally, it means that we give each the amount of help that they need to thrive. We discover as well, that often the children who needed extra help in school, nonetheless thrive and may later even equal or excel as compared to the sibling who seemed to thrive effortlessly in elementary school.

And if it is true that our children need different levels of help to thrive even though they are raised in the same home, it stands to reason with greater force that children raised in radically different environments, with very different obstacles to surmount, are going to need greater or lesser supervision, instruction and mentoring. The goal of proficiency for all students is not attainable if we refuse to recognize that some children cost more to educate than others.

That point is punctuated by the support for "funding the child" differently in accordance with cost to educate by the proponents of public voucher support. Private schools could not and would not accept the challenge of educating all children who come to them unless they received an elevated funding allocation for the children who cost the most to educate. We cannot expect public schools to do so either. Indeed, when we hear advocates from communities with very small populations of hard-to-educate children, they seldom advocate that they should get their share of the costly students along with the extra funding. Very few of these advocates would make that trade, because they know, in fact, that Minnesota's current funding system actually under-funds the hard-to-educate. They would not regard it as an acceptable solution to get the extra funding and the students who cost more along with it.

Ok, Jerry, you say, that's not very helpful.   What's to stop the legislature and governor from deciding that a child with significant learning disabilities, or a student who speaks no English, costs only  $100 more than educating a student with all the educational advantages?   Couldn't the governor and legislature make the process of judicial review essentially meaningless, by advancing an inherently ridiculous cost structure.   And that's a good point.  My answer is that safeguards exist to assure, when the government makes decisions based on facts, to assure that that the result can fairly be justified.  We'll save that topic for the next post. 

Links
McCleary v State, Washington's Groundbreaking School Finance Decision

 McCleary v. State, Part I  

McCleary v State Requires Legislature to Base Funding on Actual Cost
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part II
McCleary v State and Determining the Cost of Education
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part III
 McCleary v. State: what level of scrutiny is appropriate for legislative funding decisions
Jvonkorff on Education McCleary v. State, Part IV
Correlating the cost of education: fund the child.
Jvonkorff on Education  McCleary V. State Part V
Summary of Decision Network for Excellence
Washington Supreme Court Blog  
JvonKorff on Education, The Rose Decision 
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part I
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part II
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part III
Minnesota's School Finance System is Unconstitutional, Part IV

Why is Minnesota's School Finance Dysfunctional

Why is Minnesota Public School Dysfunctional

A few days ago, I was privileged to meet with a group of school finance experts to discuss why Minnesota's school finance system is broken.    Everybody knows that school leaders complain that school funding is not adequate, and that is certainly true.  But the problem is much more complicated than that.   Here is my own list of school finance dysfunctionalities:

• School Districts are increasingly relying on voter property tax referendums to balance their budgets.   Over 130 school districts have referendums up this year, and many of them are seeking to renew their referendums.  Since 1986, the percentage of school districts with referenda has risen from 47% to over 90 percent.  The average referendum dollars collected per student has risen significantly as well, with more and more districts collecting in the $700 to $1000 per student range.   Because referendum revenue has become so important to school districts, the failure of a referendum can have catastrophic impact on a particular district.  
• State funding formulas are not evidence based.    The legislature does not utilize evidence to determine how much money should be provided to accomplish a designated mission.   Formulas are based on politics and necessity.   We lawyers would describe this state of affairs by stating that the funding formulas lack a rational basis.    Nobody makes even a half-hearted attempt to connect the formula to data.    Funding for schools serving large numbers of students in poverty is not based on research or data showing the amount of money that can provide adquate resources to make up for the additional actual cost of educating those students.  Funding for students who don't speak English is not based on research or data showing the additional cost of educating those students.   Funding for students with disabilities is intentionally and knowingly set at rates substantially less than required to accomplish state mandated objectives.  
• The special education funding shortfall -- the difference between state-mandated spending and total revenues provided has grown to a projected $700 million per year.    
• The state's labor laws and bargaining system inherently produce labor cost increases at a rate faster than funding increases.    As a result, school districts are driven systemically to fund labor cost increases by making crippling cuts in programs, unless they can make up the difference in increased referendum levies.  The cost of these settlements is inadequately monitored and often reported in misleading ways so that policy makers don't focus on their true costs. 
• Many school districts have continuing contract obligations that force up labor costs beyond the revenues provided by the State even without bargaining  Steps, lanes, longevity pay, insurance costs have been driving labor costs up faster than state funding increases.  
• Fundamental changes in state mandates have drastically increased the cost of what school districts are required to do, without proportionate increases in revenue.  Since 1990, Minnesota has transformed its education system so that all school districts must educate all students to high levels of proficiency.   This has dramatically increased the cost of educating disadvantaged students, but funding for education has not recognized this fundamental change in mission.   
• Open Enrollment Has Destabilized School Finance in Challenged Systems.   Different students cost fundamentally different amounts to educate.  At the top of the cost scale are students with disabilities.   At the bottom of the cost scale are advantaged students who receive strong educational support at home.  The cost structure allows school districts to make a profit on the cheaper students and requires them to cross subsidize the more expensive students.    Open enrollment allows and encourages the cheaper students to migrate into the school districts where low cost students predominant, causing an ever worsening financial situation in the districts where high cost students are concentrated.    
• The special education funding formula also destablizes school finance in challenged Systems.   Migration of non-disabled students to charter schools and open enrollment into traditional publics create a situation where urban core districts have high proportions of high cost students. 
• Different school districts have significantly different tax bases.  As a result some districts can raise significantly more revenue with a low mil rate than others which require a much higher mil rate.   Different school districts have very different population demographics and consequently in some districts it is very easy to pass a referendum while in others it is virtually impossible.  
• Funding Pressures are bleeding down critical capital and capital-like assets.  School districts are increasingly cannibalizing their textbook resources, school libraries, staff development in order to make ends meet.   The State's system of assuring that these necessary components of education are provided is abysmal.   
• The State has mismanaged the funding of pension systems and forced school districts to increase contributions without compensating revenue increases

Commissioner’s Education Funding Working Group strikes out on special education funding.

From time to time, a task force is convened to fix Minnesota's broken school finance system.   Every time that happens, the task force or commission runs up against a major problem:  the growing special education deficit.   Every time, the task force must decide whether to solve that problem, or to continue the current system, which shifts most of the burden onto a selected subset of school districts, primarily urban center districts, the Twin Cities, Duluth, and regional hubs like St. Cloud.   The basic problem has always been that whatever formula used, it works out that districts with high special education populations lose out and carry huge deficits. 

St. Cloud's current deficit is approaching $9 million.  Anoka's is rising beyond $28 million.  Minnesota's projected special education deficit is projected to be 700 million per year by 2013.  (See chart at the bottom of this blog post) The Education Finance Working Group has not adopted a final solution, but the news is not looking very promising for an honest,  courageous, and fair solution in special education.  It appears, based on postings at the MDE that the Commissioner's Education Funding Working Group has decided to put a few bandaids on the problem, and call it even.  

This blog may be unjust, and its author unfair.  I certainly hope so.  But it appears that the price tag is  too big to advance a straightforward solution.   And so, we are beginning to see, regrettably, once again, a bandaid solution that ignores the most significant and financially stifling problem facing education finance in Minnesota.   

There is one and only one possible solution to this problem, and that is to provide $700 million in additional revenues to local school districts, or to provide them with discretionary revenues to fund the part of the deficit which the State refuses to cover out of state sources.   True, the magnitude of this special education deficit problem could be cushioned by reducing state mandated spending.   For example, the State could eliminate spending mandates in excess of the Federal IDEA requirements.  But neither Republicans nor Democrats, nor the MDE Commissioner, nor anyone on the task force, apparently, is willing to advance this idea.   That means, evidently, that the Funding Working Group is apparently beginning with the assumption that special education costs will continue to rise unabated in Minnesota and that certain districts will continue to eat those costs.

As long as the task force insists in holding the cost side of special education harmless, there is only one honest, constitutional solution to this underfunding problem, and that is to close the funding gap with additional revenues.  Why will the task force not advance this simple straightforward solution?  The answer is that the education community in Minnesota has continued to enable the MDE, the legislature and the governor, in sweeping the special education funding problem under the rug, as if it was someone else's problem.  

Time after time, this issue has been addressed with half measures and evasions.  Time after time, the solution in Minnesota has to been to blame the federal government, and pass the deficit on to a subclass of local districts.    It is as if the representatives of the education in Minnesota has agreed to the proposition that the Emperor has new clothes.  They say, "we have a 700 million dollar annual special education deficit in Minnesota:.  If we solved that problem in a straightforward way, it would cost too much money, so lets not bother trying."  

And so, the Working Group appears headed once again to place bandaids on special education funding..   Various funding formula devices seem to be under discussion, none of which even remotely equalize the burden.   Some form of minor cost shifting in favor of "receiving" districts is under consideration, it appears.  The result would be modest adjustments still leaving great gaping holes in special education funding to be carried by the unfortunate districts who are designated to carry the load for the entire state.   

Again, I would be happy to be proven wrong.  If my interpretation proves unjust, I'll be the first to extend my apologies.  But it appears that the Working Group is going to continue the Minnesota practice of balancing the education budget on the backs of a few districts once again while calling the result a "Miracle."  

At the same time, it appears, the funding working group is toying with the idea of actually limiting the role of local taxation in solving the shortfall for the disfavored districts.   Most school districts that are carrying humongous state mandated special education deficits survive by passing operating referendums. Yet, it appears that the Working Group is operating under the mistaken belief that constitutional equality means denying revenue to districts with higher state mandated special education deficits.   The Working Group seems still to be operating under the philosophy that was actually rejected in the Skeen decision, to wit, that the constitution requires equality of funding sources.  In fact, the Constitution requires exactly the opposite.  The Constitution demands that when the state shifts greater costs onto a local district, that the State must provide a revenue source, state or local, to cover that deficit. 

Having denied local school districts state revenues to close their state mandated special education funding, logic would suggest that then the Working Group would provide local districts with local revenues to equalize the burden.  But instead, the working group appears to be going in the opposite direction.   The motto of the Working Group appears to be the same as other task forces in the past:   Equalize everything except for special education.   Make everything fair, except for special education, which is, well just too hard to solve to make things fair.  

Listen.   Any solution that fails to equalize the special education burden in Minnesota is doomed to failure.  It is not constitutional.  It is not just.  It is nothing more than a way for the districts with lower special education responsibilities to gang up on the subgroup of school districts who have high and costly responsibilities.   And, such a solution fails cannot withstand constitutional strict scrutiny and is destined to be struck down.  

Other posts on Special education finance:

• Does Dayton Budget Attack the Special Education Deficit

• Excess Cost Pro-Ration

• House Omnibus Bill Buys formula increases with Special education cuts

Win Win Win! Take the 700 Million Dollar Constitutional Challenge Win Win Win

In the next few weeks, I want you to help me analyze what I think are serious constitutional defects in Minnesota's school finance system.  I've been having a dialog with folks throughout the state who are in the "I've had enough" camp when it comes to the financial mess that is our public school finance.  More and more people are telling me that its time to challenge the constitutionality of our school finance system, and to force the legislature clean up the mess once and for all.   Some of the issues are pretty boring to read about--the law being pretty dang dry.   So, I decided to try to find a way make a dull topic a bit more interesting.  

To whet your interest in a bit of constitutional law, I'm offering  a reward to the person who accepts, and wins, the 700 million dollar constitutional law challenge.   You don't need to be a lawyer to take the challenge.  In fact, being a lawyer probably is going to get in your way.   All you have to do is to be a rational person, and that surely is what you are, or you wouldn't be reading my blog, right!  Can you anticipate a rational reason why the current system can be justified?  

What's the challenge?  What's the reward?  Be patient.  First the challenge, then the reward.    Here's the challenge:

The Challenge:  Provide a "Rational Basis" -- a rational reason -- for Minnesota's System for Special Education Funding, which will soon force local school districts to spend nearly $700 million ($700,000,000) per year more than the revenues provided to fund that spending.

To answer the question, you need to know how the special education finance system works.  The state makes districts spend more money than they have, and some way way more than others.  St. Cloud spends about nine million dollars more than it has, and can't do anything about it.  Anoka-Hennipen spends $28 million more than it has, and can't do anything about it.   If we get into financial difficulty, we can't cut the amount that we are spending.  We have to keep on spending the same amount, no matter how tough your financial difficulties get.  But that's not all. The state purposely increases the amount that school districts must spend, year after year, and purposely increases the difference between mandatory spending and revenues year after year.

Now your almost ready to answer the question.  But you need to know a bit more about the way special education finance system works.  Over the last several years, the Federal Government has been putting more money into special education and sending it out to the states.  So that helps, right.  No, actually, for many school districts, the State reduces the amount of state money paid to the local district for special education by more than the federal government's increase.

Now, when County or city government is required to run a program at a loss, the state gives the county or city government taxing power to make up the difference.  School districts used to have some taxing power to cover the deficit in special education funding too.  But the state took that taxing power away.  Why?  Because the legislature decided that the State should cover ALL of the special education costs not paid by the State.  But it didn't take very long for governors and legislators to forget about the revenue promise -- and the local districts were left with a growing unfunded deficit in special education, but no local revenue source to cover it.

Now this idea of a "rational basis," has a legal meaning.  If you are going to go for the big prize, you need to understand what it means.  "Rational Basis" is a legal term.  The House legislative research service explains rational basis as follows:

A rational basis test applies to economic regulation not involving suspect classifications and, thus, to most of the classifications involved in the tax laws.  In general, a classification has a rational basis and is constitutional, if it reasonably related to or has some rational relationship to the objective the legislature sought to achieve.  The rational basis test gives the legislature considerable flexibility in creating classifications.

So the idea is this.  Do you think that a court could look at the system I've described above and find a rational reason for setting things up that way.  Any reason? In order to convince me that there is a logical reason, any logical reason, for forcing school districts to spend $700 million more than they take in on special education. and keep growing the deficit more and more, year after year.

You get the idea.   The winner has to come up with a rational basis for the system.  By way of example, if I asked you to find a "rational basis" for the law that says that you can't build a glue factory in a residential neighborhood, you could say, "glue is too smelly; people can't live next to it."  Or, "glue fumes are dangerous to children."   But I wouldn't accept, "don't put anything that starts with a 'g' in a residential neighborhood."  Or, "I don't believe in glue." Or, glue is usually made by Republicans."   Those reasons aren't rational.

So that's the $700 million dollar challenge.  I call it the $700 million challenge, because that is the amount of the underfunding that is in the Dayton budget for 2012.  The republicans are proposing to make the deficit even larger.  They're both taking money out of special education, as if it were a government cash register, without allowing local districts to cut their spending or raising revenue to cover the cuts.  So I want you to assume that you were the judge in a court case and you were asked to sustain the system because it had a "rational basis," could you come up with one.

That's the challenge.  The reward.  We'll its not $700 million.  I'll publish the best and most creative answers in future blogs.  For your information, I've included the chart that shows the total mandated special education expenditures in Minnesota as compared to the total of all state and local revenue sources for special education.

Vaunted KIPP Charters alleged to Spend $18K per Student

I've been following a raging battle over whether the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter schools are effectively attacking the achievement gap. There are about 91 KIPP charter schools (click here) in the United States. They tend to be middle schools serving fifth through eighth graders. They are controversial, because they tend to be non-union schools, although a number have been recently unionized. They make significant demands on teachers, requiring them to work longer hours. They expect students to sign contracts promising to meet high attendance and behavior standards. They provide longer school days for their students and have been held up as making significant inroads on the achievement gap.

A new report, called the Miron study, now asserts that KIPP charters spend $18 thousand dollars per students in efforts to close the achievement gap. (Click Here). KIPP has been held up as an example by pundits, national politicians, and critics of public schools, as an example of what school reform should look like. This has led public school interests to say: Instead of reforming public education by shrinking our budgets, give us $18,000 per student and we'll look pretty good too!

The use of KIPP as a model for what public schools should be doing has led to a series of studies and counter studies, interpretations and counter interpretations. One side adamantly claims that "the research" on these schools proves that KIPP students outperform equivalent students of similar backgrounds in public schools. The centerpiece of the KIPP advocates is the Mathematica study. (Click here) The KIPP skeptics adamantly claims that "the research" establishes that KIPP schools operate under markedly different conditions and that their success arises from selectivity, receive substantially greater funding. They claim that KIPP elevates its results artificially by ignoring the departure of students who aren't capable of fulfilling KIPP expectations. The centerpiece of this view is found in the recent Miron study. (Click Here).

The skeptics have long claimed that KIPP schools have an unfair advantage, because they are more selective than regular public schools. When schools enroll students by choice, the theory goes, they are likely to have better outcomes than schools who take all students. The Kipp supporters argue, on the contrary, the demographics of KIPP students, in terms of race and poverty, are comparable to the schools with which they are compared. That claim is hotly disputed by KIPP advocates.

The KIPP skeptics point out that KIPP schools take significantly fewer ELL (that is non-English speaking) enrollees, and that they also take significantly fewer special education students. KIPP proponents concede that this claim is true. Lower ELL and special education populations would negate statistical comparisons of student results, at least without significant adjustment. This suggests that KIPP schools have a significant cost advantage, (in addition to their receipt of greater revenues per student) because public schools must transfer scarce dollars out of regular education to fund costly special education programs that are not fully funded by the state and federal government.

This is a common flaw in criticisms of public school finance. Critics often divide the total cost of public education by the number of students for public schools and then compare that same ratio to private schools and charter. What they ignore is that the publics are mandated to spend huge sums on special education, but are not reimbursed for those extra costs. Calculating the average cost of educating all students (including non-English speaking students and special education students) for publics and comparing that cost to the cost of educating only English speaking non-disabled students for privates and charters is silly and misleading. That's like comparing the average cost of compact cars and SUV's for Ford to the average cost of compact cars for GM and claiming that Ford spends way more money to produce cars.

The critics also claim that KIPP schools experience higher rates of attrition than comparison schools. They argue that the drop out students represent potential KIPP failures, and so when we look at KIPP results, we are not counting students for whom KIPP fails.

Proponents of KIPP schools rely heavily on a research report which contends that KIPP students make greater than average progress. Critics of KIPP schools claim that this is a statistical artifact of the factors mentioned above. They argue too, as stated above that KIPP schools are beneficiaries of large foundation support, and that as a result, they function with about 50% greater funds than the comparison schools. According to the Miron study, KIPP schools spend about $18,000 per student, where as comparison schools spend only about $12,000 per student per year.

The findings in our report show that students with disabilities and students classified as English language learners are greatly underrepresented. The relative absence of students with disabilities and English language learners results in more homogeneous classrooms. Secondly, in both traditional public schools and KIPP schools, the additional costs for these students—especially students with moderate or severe disabilities—is typically not fully funded, and therefore some of the costs for regular education is devoted to students requiring additional remediation. Because traditional public schools have a higher proportion of students with disabilities, and a higher concentration of students with severe and moderate disabilities, the burden of having to subsidize their education falls more heavily on them.

I report these questions about KIPP despite the fact that I have long admired many of the good things that KIPP schools do. What does the research on KIPP prove? One thing that it seems to prove, beyond any doubt, is that the supporters of KIPP's approach are being disingenuous when they fail to recognize that KIPP schools are functioning on half again as much money per student as comparable traditional public schools. Ironically, many of the proponents use special schools like KIPP to justify reducing funding for regular public schools, when actually, the KIPP experience would seem to support the strong inference that the models which reformers tout, are actually way more expensive. If KIPP is successful, then the success justifies greater, not less, expenditures are necessary to close the achievement gap.

Past Posts on Achievement Gap
Attacking the Achievement Gap Means Helping Students Rise Above their Parents Education
Making Stuff up About the Achievement Gap
Get Ready for College
School Choice will not close the achievement gap
Some students cost more to educate (1)
Some students Cost more to educate(2)

Join the Win-Win Legislative Agenda, to put kids first in education

Public education faces a financial crisis this biennium that threatens our ability to provide a high quality education that Minnesota children deserve. In the last four years, the funding formula has gone up a total of 3 percent, with the last two years frozen. The special education deficit has begun to grow significantly again, and more districts are experiencing larger special education cross subsidies. Districts that had adequate reserves are losing them. More and more districts are reducing teachers and other staff, closing schools, raising fees, and cutting important programs. At the same time, over the last four years, the bargaining system in Minnesota has caused most school districts to increase compensation costs far beyond their capacity to pay.

The win-win legislative agenda says that we cannot solve these problems
without both cost controls and adequate revenues.

We call for:

• Support for Senate File 0056 or its equivalent, which imposes a statewide hard freeze for public education employees through June 30, 2013
  

• Support for House File 0092 which permanently repeals the bargaining penalty.

• Support for a modest formula increase to assist school districts so that districts can recover from the last four years of funding neglect
  

• Support for a legislative appropriation to cover the increased costs attributable to the four year ½ percent annual increase in district contributions to TRA and PERA

• Support for repeal of special education mandates that exceed the federal requirements of IDEA or for State funding to cover those excess costs. Support for a statewide review of the cost drivers in special education leading to proposals to assure that special education is fully funded and sustainable.

Our support for a hard-freeze is not anti-labor or anti-teacher. We believe in our teachers and want them to be well-paid. The win-win legislative agenda is based on putting children first.

We are in the process of listening to our fellow board members and other citizens across the State to determine if there is widespread support for the win-win legislative agenda. We believe that it offers an opportunity for Governor Dayton and the legislative majority to compromise in the interest of children. We know that the DFL will struggle with the temporary hard freeze, and we know that the legislative majority will struggle with finding modest new revenues, but we believe that the win-win agenda offers a compromise that provides public education with a reprieve from destructive cuts, and puts our children first.

To provide input, comments, suggestions for revisions, or to offer your help....contact me at jvonkorff at charter dot net

What does it mean to "do what's best for kids."

In today's post, I want to talk about two ideas that are sort of related. The first is our propensity to explain all of the things we do in public education as doing what's best for kids. Then, in the second half of this post, I want to provide a couple more examples of school districts that are about to make huge cuts after having agreed to settlements way beyond their means. Then I want to argue that putting kids first means controlling costs and providing appropriate revenues, both. If we really mean to put kids first, then we can't take anything off the table, because that's what putting kids first means.

In the last couple of weeks, I heard the Minneapolis Superintendent of Schools interviewed on public radio, and then in a later program, I heard an interview with the new Commissioner of Education. Each of them, when asked about an important decision they made as administrators in Minneapolis said that they made their decision based on "what's best for kids." The Superintendent was referring to a decision to close a high school in North Minneapolis. The Commissioner was referring to a controversial school restructuring. Now I have no reason to believe that either decision was bad; on the contrary, I have to assume that those decisions had lots of good reasons behind them. Then, at the beginning of the legislative session, I heard a Republican leader say that when it comes to education, the majority is going to put kids first.

This idea that we "do what's best for kids" is pretty standard lingo for us in the education business.

But I want to suggest that we, in the education business, tend to use the phrase "what's best for kids" as shorthand for something that we agree with, or at times, something that is really terrible for kids, but that we have decided to do anyway, because we lack the courage to do what is really best for kids. It's a way of defending something without having to explain why its a good idea. Why is building a new school, or closing the school a good idea? Why did we cut 100 positions in our budget? "Because its good for kids."

We close a school because its best for kids. We get rid of a program and put in a new one in its place, because its best for kids. We select the new textbook series that's best for kids, and we choose K-8 programming, or middle school programming, or K-4 programming, because, yes, that's good for kids too. If there's a great big debate between two factions, each of which has opposing views on a decision, well, we make the choice that's best for kids, of course, and that means that the other faction's point of view was, well, not in the best interest of kids, I guess.

Everybody in education has the best of motives. But when we assert that our decisions are, by definition, good for kids, we are going down the wrong road. Some of the things we do in education aren't all that good for kids really. Sometimes, the decisions that we make are flat out rotten for kids, and maybe that's because we have gotten into the habit of believing that if we do it, it must be good for kids.

I've been giving some examples of school districts that are about to make major cuts, lately, as examples of the fiscal chaos that we are going through in Minnesota. When I do that, I mean no disrespect to the fine superintendents, HR leadership, and school boards that find themselves in difficult straights. I understand how they got into these binds, because the pressures that lead us down this road are enormous. The reason that I provide these examples, such as Anoka and Lakeville, is not because I believe that the leadership of these districts are incompetent. I'm providing these examples, rather, to show that the current system forces good people to do some terrible things that they don't really want to do.

A few days ago, the Woodbury Bulletin reported on budgetary problems in the South Washington school district, (District 833), one of our state's larger school districts. The Bulletin reports that District 833 may tap most of its reserve funds, rather than cut programs, to balance next year's budget. The article continues:

The district will face an $11.7 million deficit if the School Board makes no cuts to projected spending in the 2011-12 academic year and the Minnesota Legislatures leaves aid to South Washington County Schools goes unchanged.

Now in its last bargaining round, South Washington County settled with its teachers for a MSBA reported total package increase of 4.16%. For that biennium, the District received no increase, and it raised compensation by a reported 4.16%. Keep in mind, however, that the MSBA total package cost indicator understates the actual increase in costs, so it is likely that the South Washington increases were actually higher than 5%. Just to give you an example, our own district, St. Cloud, settled for a real total package increase of 3 percent, but the MSBA reported our rate of increase at 2.46%.

Is there anybody out there that believes that the leadership in South Washington would provide these increases if they had a choice, or that they believe that the cuts that they are about to make as a result are "good for kids?" These increases are happening because school leadership is so totally resigned to the inevitable annual cuts, that they cannot even conceive of the possibility that school districts budgets could ever go one or two years staying in balance. They have given up all hope of keeping costs and revenues in balance, in good years and in bad.

A recent article in the Rosemont Patch reports on the another impending crisis in the Rosemont-Apple Valley school district, another of Minnesota's largest. According to the Patch:

Superintendent Jane Berenz said at Monday's meeting that even if the state doesn't make any cuts to education this session, the district still will have to cut or find revenue for $14 million for its 2011-12 budget.

These impending cuts follow on last year's cuts in the District. "One of the largest cuts was eliminating 144 full-time equivalent staff for $7.65 million in savings. The district also reduced its supply budget by 10 percent, eliminated middle school sports including football, baseball and softball and reduced energy costs."

If you look at the settlement information on the MSBA website for Rosemont A-V, you find that the District's total package compensation increases were reported at 6.14 percent, which translates into an actual increase that is likely over 7 percent, for a biennium in which the formula was frozen without increase.

Just recently the Minneapolis School District, after holding out for nearly a year past the bargaining deadline of last January 15, finally settled its labor contracts. The teacher settlement alone will cost an additional $10.9 million. The District's refusal to pay these increases, originally, had cost it an $800,000 fine. Before settling for these increase, the District had projected "a huge looming budget deficit of $30 million to $45 million next year." Once the tentative settlement is approved, if it is approved, "negotiations will have to start again this summer for the next school year's contract." A school district official blamed the state of Minnesota's failure to provide enough revenue:

"It's been going on basically for the last eight years—the state of Minnesota hasn't kept up with the rate of inflation, let alone funding all of the mandates or the laws," Madden said. "It gets old to look in the rear view mirror and make all these cuts as opposed to looking forward and saying, 'How can we make sure all these kids are achieving.'"

We don't know where the $50 millions of cuts will occur, in the Minneapolis District which has repeatedly endured a series of painful cuts, but I'm sure that the choices made by the school board and superintendent will be made in the spirit of "doing what's best for kids."

If we are really going to put kids first, then we can't take the things that are good for kids off the table before we start. Democrats can't. Labor can't. School boards can't, and Republicans can't. If controlling labor costs will help education serve kids--that can't be off the table, even if it is painful, if we are going to put kids first. If additional revenues and, yes, taxes, would prevent destructive cuts in education, then putting kids first--doing what's good for kids--requires considering them too. Putting the education of our children first, requires just that, putting everything else aside, and doing what we need to do, to maintain a financially sound education system.

2011 Budgets: 2010 legislature and governor imposes brand new unfunded pension mandate

On Wednesday of next week, our Board of Education will conduct a workshop to begin the budgeting process for budget year running from July 1, 2011 through June 30, 2012. The administration is going to tell us that in the coming budget, Governor Pawlenty and the legislature passed along to us an additional $1.2 million in new unfunded mandate costs in the last legislative session. We will be told that unless we rescind them in the coming collective bargaining agreements, we will absorb $ 1 million for in additional compensation costs before we even begin bargaining. The Board of Education is going to have to do some really hard thinking about what sustainable finances mean.

We face the following financial challenges:

• Unfunded cost increase in TRA and PERA retirement fund contributions will rise $250,000 per year each of the next four years. (I explained this cost in the prior post)

• Annual cost of special education pro-ration revenue reductions will increase $350,000 per year, each year until the legislature fixes this problem. (I'll explain this cost in my next post)

• Total state special education unfunded mandate deficit in our district is about $8.5 million.

• Annual cost of compensation increases under continuing contract agreements (health benefits and lanes) $500,000 per year. Of the costs listed above, this is the only one that we can do something about through bargaining.

I'm going to run a series of posts explaining the financial factors that are driving our budget. Today, I'm going to discuss the increases in pension contributions required by the legislature that require our school district and other school districts to increase our contributions to the State retirement pension programs for public employees. We have employees in both the TRA and PERA plans.. Over the last decade, both of these plans were allowed to get out of actuarial balance, paying out too much and committing to benefits that were higher than the plans could sustain for the long run. Somebody wasn't minding the store at the State.

The deficiency in contributions--or if you prefer, the excess in TRA payouts in the pension plans--amounted to about 3.3 percent of payroll. To put that in perspective, that would be about $1.6 million per year for licensed teachers for our school district alone. To address this problem, Governor Pawlenty and the legislature agreed to impose a brand new unfunded mandate on school districts. Under legislation passed last year employing unit contribution rates for school districts will increase 0.5% a year for each of the four years beginning July 1, 2011. All of our employee plans taken together will experience employer contribution increases totaling more than $250,000 each year. By the end of four years, our total pension costs will have increased by $1,000,000 per year without any funding increase by the legislature to take care of these increases.

Who will absorb the costs of these mandates? Should the cost increases associated with providing increased pension benefits to teachers and other employees (albeit retroactively) be absorbed by parents and students through cuts in their local school districts across the state? Should they be absorbed by increased taxes at the State level? Should they be absorbed by funding reductions in other state programs--health, environment, state public employee pay reductions? Should they be absorbed by increased taxes at the local level? Should they be absorbed by local employee pay reductions? Governor Pawlenty signed this unfunded mandate without answering this question. In doing so, he was joining hands with the DFL dominated legislature in just one more act of increasing mandates on local school districts without answering the painful question: where is the money going to come from to fund this new cost.

Under the rules operating in last year's legislature, when the governor and legislature increased local school districts obligations, providing additional funds to meet these obligations was, well, off the table. It was part of the basic operating principle that has existed in our State recently that affords a higher priority to public employees and taxpayers than children in school. And so, here is a new unfunded mandate passed along to school districts in a legislative year when the entire legislature, Republicans and Democrats alike, were telling us that they were committed to reducing unfunded mandates.

Now don't be yelling at me, please. These plans are not run by local school districts. We don't set the amount of benefits. We didn't decide to increase benefits permanently when the stock market went up temporarily. We don't manage TRA or PERA investment policies. Both plans are funded, like social security, by a combination of employer and employee contributions. When eventually the State recognized that something had to be done to make these plans solvent, the legislature decided to make school districts (and employees), as well as municipal and county government (PERA) pay more into the plans. However, the legislature provided no new revenues to school districts to fund these contributions, as I have said. You can find more about the reasons for and operation of these increases at the following websites: Click Here. Click Here.

If we were in an ordinary year, we'd say, look, this is no big deal. If we received, say, a 3 percent increase in funding, we could allocate the proportionate share of the 3 percent to employees, and then deduct the TRA costs from compensation increases. But in the last two years, we've had no increases from the State. And so, we have only two choices, really, to make things come out even. One, is to pass the increased pension plan costs on to kids, by cutting programs. Or, we could take it out of employment compensation through collective bargaining, but that would require us to implement actual pay cuts, because we don't expect to receive additional revenues from the State.

The other solution would be for the new State legislature, now under the control of Republicans most of whom campaigned on no unfunded mandates, to fund this mandate. A member of the Republican legislative leadership said that this legislative session we're going to "put children first." What does that mean in this context? First before public employees? First before no-new taxes pledge? What would it mean for our board of education to put children first? Should we be passing the cuts passed along to us by Governor Pawlenty and the Democrats in ways that make children and parents pay the costs?